rubenverborgh

Just not putting all my cards on the table for them to see yet, but I will eventually. The tone drew attention to the case from press and local authorities, which resulted in the right people reaching out to me. It's unconventional, but there's a method in my madness.

I have zero interest in harassing people. Unconventional replies cause escalation; Facebook’s current staff on this is on a higher pay scale than most. I’ve made my mails impossible to ignore to the point of there being no plausible deniability; the entire GDPR department is aware by now. Given what you and others wrote above, it should probably be clear what real actions are going on behind the smoke and mirrors on my site.

Those are strong assumptions :-) And the snark has a purpose, it’s what draws the attention of readers and people who follow suit. Dry legalese is seldom read.

Exactly.

A precedent, I think.

Trust me, I don't take myself too seriously ;-)

Facebook responds with an overload of legal nonsense to discourage people from replying. I overload them with a lot of non-legal nonsense. In the end I just want my data—it's my legal right.

No worries, that e-mail is definitely not my only response. Not putting all my cards on the table yet.

Grandstanding is not my goal; it's a means of attracting attention to a matter that people have been desensitized to. A secondary goal is to cause internal escalation. In the end, I really just want my data, as way to create a path for myself and others.

Unfortunately, "pretty sure" is not the way sound arguments are made ;-) Evidence is: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options... and http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20171...

Such a centralization comes with the risk of websites only working with one browser, forcing people to chose a certain device, operating system, and browser vendor.

At that point, it becomes a legal matter. Not everything can be solved with technology. (There's homomorphic encryption, bet let's leave that aside for now.) The GDPR legislation in Europe sets a good precedent for demanding removal of our data.

The crucial point is that Solid will bring more choice: there will be social feed viewers that will be more invasive, and those that will be less invasive. People can choose the one they like, without consequences as to whom they can interact with. Today, we do not have a choice: if we want to interact with people who use Facebook, we have to use Facebook as well.

It does. But linkeddata.org is not an authoritative source, and even though that statement is partially correct, that doesn't mean that JavaScript developers will need to be exposed to RDF. Just like JavaScript developers aren't exposed to assembly, even though V8 generates it.

No, I mean RDF in general. As you can read in the article I linked to above, programming with Linked Data does not necessarily require RDF.

You’re confusing argumentation with perception.

Yes, I urgently need to migrate; same with Disqus, needs to become Solid.

That's not at all how argumentation works :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886753

You'll be surprised to hear that developers like Linked Data. People starting with Linked Data development today are not burdened by the Semantic Web legacy and mistakes of the past. We've been working with front-end devs who have never seen RDF, and never will. They enjoy how Linked Data is able to cross borders and leads to more data than a centralized database could ever give you.

The confusion in your comment is that one would need RDF to do Linked Data. I've written about that misconception here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linke...

Don't get me wrong, the Semantic Web community has made mistakes and has not been developer-friendly. But we're not still stuck in the 90s. For instance, XML hasn't been a part of any of this for many years.

Technologically, yes. But centralization takes many shapes (as I explain in the article: https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web...).

I encourage you to read the article, where you'll see that I'm arguing from a permissionless innovation perspective, not so much privacy.

You can mix and match parts from different vocabularies on the Web. See it as a JSON object where you can add any key you want, except that some of those keys have meaning to some applications. Apps don't have to understand everything, they just access what they need.

No: blockchain technologies are about reaching decentralized agreements. Solid is about everyone being able to write their own things (so no agreement) without centralized parties.

You control access permissions too :-)

Yes, I was asked specifically to write a chapter on Tim's work. What we have is the technology to make it work—it's a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.

Google might. They do more than advertising, including selling services. They might happily make Google Drive compatible with Solid—especially if this helps break the Solid monopoly.

Facebook, probably not so much. Their business model is data harvesting.

Regarding Solid, note that we don't want to overthrow or replace any existing social networks. We start with offering experiences they cannot offer due to their siloed nature.

How does running analytics on my site impair my ability to talk about what Tim Berners-Lee wants to do for freedom and control? ;-)

Yes, I track how popular what content is on my site. Motivates me to write more. Please feel free to block trackers; I do that as well.

More specifically a Tu quoque / appeal to hypocrisy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque :-)

Just saw this, and by total coincidence just met with Dmitri this morning. Sending you an email!

Messaging does exist; check out Linked Data Notifications (https://www.w3.org/TR/ldn/).

Technology is definitely not the only burden. Check out http://blog.dshr.org/2018/01/it-isnt-about-technology.html for a good argument.

Yeah, identity is a very crucial and difficult topic, which I did ignore in that post. Reason being: in my experience, as soon as you start about identity, it takes up everything. So I have made a couple of assumptions about authentication and identity; this is what we could build on top of that.